I have always been a big fan of Halloween. Costumes, acting like a kid, getting free candy…what’s not to love? The past two years have been almost Halloween-less for us. Last year, a good friend of mine got married the day after so her rehearsal stuff was on Halloween day. The year before, Dan and I were honeymooning it up in Disney World the day before and were too tired to go out on Halloween night.

This year I want to have a Halloween party. I want all of my friends to be forced to arrive at our place in costume and mingle with masks on. I want everyone to outwardly groan when Monster Mash starts playing, but secretly be dancing on the inside. I want our fruit punch to have fake eyeballs in it and our cupcakes to be decorated like little tombstones.

So…if someone could come over and bake these elaborate cupcakes, that would be great.

As I was describing my Halloween party plan to a coworker, there was a long moment of silence. “You’re already thinking about Halloween?” I replied yes, but defended myself by saying that I think of Christmas year round and had even blogged about it last week. There was another long pause.

“You’re not helping your case, crazy lady.”

It’s 103 out today and I’m contemplating costumes and Christmas. Maybe I am crazy.

Last night, Dan turned to me and with a bright smile, placed a catalog on the table beside me. I glanced at it but was making jewelry so I had no free hands to pick it up with. Straining to see it, I realized it was  Health and Wealth Raffle brochure.

Back in February, Dan wanted tickets for the Health and Wealth Raffle. He wanted me to buy them for his (July) birthday gift. I asked him repeatedly if he was going to mope if he didn’t win anything. No, he swore to me, he wouldn’t mope. I asked if he would be bummed if all he won was a blender. No, he insisted, he was going to be happy no matter if he won a prize or not. Fast forward to the day of the drawing and we didn’t win. Can you guess who was grumpy?

Also note that he still expected a birthday gift come July.

So when I saw the catalog I immediately shook my head. No. No way. Nothing doing. We were not buying tickets for the Fall raffle. “But it’s for charity!” “It benefits a hospital!” “Don’t you want to help those less fortunate than you?” “We could win a million dollars!” His statements did not convince me.

One of the prizes is also a car. If we win a BMW, he gets to drive it. If we win a Mini Cooper, I claim dibs. If we win the ugly yellow Porsche, we sell it and I get a Vespa use the money for more practical things.

Then I realized this could work in my favor. About a month ago, I found out I had won a grant. I was pretty excited because we’ve been needing new towels. (School grant money = towels, of course.) All I could talk about was how excited I was to get the towels. I browsed online sites for them and wanted to go towel window shopping. I mentioned them almost daily and sometimes got so excited, I could barely get the words out. Needless to say, Dan was less than thrilled. He finally asked me not to mention towels again until at least August 18th, the day before we get the money.

So when I realized Dan wanted these raffle tickets, I decided to use it to my advantage. I told him if he agreed to let me talk about towels as much as I wanted to for the next 3 weeks, we would buy the 3 pack of tickets. There was a veeeeeerrrrrrrry long pause. He finally sighed and agreed.

NEW towels! New TOWELS!  Towels towels towels towels TOWELS!

It’s been about 20 hours since he agreed and I have said the word “towels” at least 40 times.

For Dan’s birthday, we got him a Wii. I tried to get him a “wee kitten” but that didn’t go over so well. In fact, he made me promise that I would:

A) not buy him a kitten
B) not buy him any sort of new pet, for that matter
C) not have the waiters sing to him when we went out for his birthday dinner and
D) not buy him a kitten. For reals.

With this outrageous stifling of my gift giving creativity, I decided to get him an amp for his car. But then we heard that he has a ruptured ear drum and buying him an even louder stereo system is probably not going to help that. So finally, the Wii was decided upon.

I made him set it up so we could play together. He set it up and then remembered that he had a WOW raid to do. So while he was raiding, I was practicing my skillz in boxing.

Let’s just say, I am the next George Foreman. (The boxer, not the grill. I just didn’t want to list Mike Tyson who bites ears off because that’s gross. I can’t believe I justified this joke. Punchline FAIL.)